BASICS OF SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING
BY Imeru Wambui
What is Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is defined as a form of digital advertising that serves paid ads to your target audience using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, and Pinterest.
Social media advertising is a category of digital advertising that places ads on social networking sites. It has one of three purposes: branding, response, or both. It is one of two major social media marketing tactics: paid and organic.
Social media advertising across the world is projected to exceed $8.5 billion around the world. With half the global population on social media, businesses and brands can’t afford to ignore leveraging social media platforms to increase their brand awareness and brand reach.
From the most popular platforms to the more obscure, it’s crucial that brands and businesses today understand the best practices of as many social networks as they can. The key is to find out which social media platform your target market is using most often and how to make the most out of it
What Are the Advantages of Social Media Advertising?
With social media advertising, you can reach specific target audiences. Social media advertising can drive leads and sales for your business.
• Reach specific target audiences
• Variety of ad formats
• Invest in efforts that drive leads and sales
What Types of Ad Formats Are Available?
Social media advertising provides a variety of ad formats across platforms. These include the following,
• Photo and video ads
• Shopping ads
• Lead ads
• Message ads
- And many more
SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS TO ADVERTISE ON
What is a Social media platform
Social Media Platform means mobile and/or internet-based platform used and controlled by a user or any affiliates for the exclusive purpose of promoting their brand.
Social Media Platforms are the foundation on which you can build your brand presence, such as the web, phone apps, social media, and gadgets.
They include any profiles or accounts on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube, etc.
Choosing a platform requires a deep understanding of your target audience in order to drive value and create the strongest impact with your messaging. Social media is always changing some topics, trends and features quickly become outdated and, eventually, obsolete. These changes can result in both challenges or opportunities for your business, you have to be adaptive and responsive to the changes each platform makes, so you don’t miss out on potential opportunities to connect with them
Nearly 2.5 billion people around the world use Facebook. That’s more than 30% of the world population. Across the world, 20 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses every month on Facebook Messenger.
There are three types of audiences that you can target on Facebook:
•Facebook Core audiences it’s an audience based on criteria like age, interests, and geography.
• Facebook Custom audiences its getting back in touch with people who have engaged with your business
• Facebook Lookalike audiences its reaching new people whose interests are similar to those of your best customers.
How Facebook scores your Ads
Relevance score was Facebook’s way of scoring your ad based on its expected performance. Facebook uses three key metrics to rate the expected performance of your ads:
• Quality- How good your ad is in comparison to ads from other advertisers competing for the same audience.
• Engagement- How much engagement your ad receives compared to others competing for the same audience.
• Conversion- The conversion rate of your ads compared to others with the same campaign goal and the same type of advertisement.
Advertising on Facebook includes a range of ad types, including:
• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Story ads
- Lead ads
Instagram is an image and video content-based platform boasting over 1 billion monthly users globally. That’s a little less than half of the number of users on Facebook.
There are three ways that you can advertise on Instagram:
• Promote posts and stories directly from your Instagram professional account.
• Create ads from your Facebook Page and promote them on both Facebook and Instagram.
• Create ad campaigns in the Facebook Ads Manager to access full targeting capabilities.
Instagram has similar ad types to Facebook, which including:
• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Story ads
• Ads in the explore tab
- Shopping post ads
The LinkedIn platform has over 660 million monthly active members worldwide. With 97percent of B2B marketers use it as part of their digital marketing mix. It’s the most effective platform for lead generation, more effective than Facebook and Twitter. It’s a primarily professional networking social media platform
You can target users on LinkedIn by unique demographics, including:
• Job title
• Job function
• Industry
Twitter has over 330 million monthly users globally that’s half the size of LinkedIn. Its format is ideal for timely content meaning the platform is popular for news and customer service
Twitter breaks down its ads into five goals:
• Awareness
• Tweet engagement
• Follows
• Website clicks
• App downloads
YOUTUBE
Video content continues to take over social media, only YouTube boasts of a higher number of minutes among the major social networks. YouTube is the second largest search engine with over 2 billion monthly active users. It’s the largest video hosting platform, 2nd largest search platform after Google, and 2nd most visited website.
It offers a variety of advertising options and you can optimize your videos for search. Ads on YouTube Appear before and during other YouTube videos or as a stand-alone promoted video that’s displayed after performing a search.
Pinterest is a unique social media platform that’s characterized by its 300 million users who are highly engaged and predominantly female. It has a visual-first focus ideal platform for highlighting products and inspirational content. It’s a social platform in which users explore, share and store content they find inspiring, helpful, or entertaining with 80percent of all pins in Pinterest are re-pins.
How to advertise on Pinterest in four steps:
1. Pick a pin
2. Decide who sees it
3. Pay for results
4. Track what’s working
SNAPCHAT
Snapchat’s 218 million users are predominantly made up of people between the ages of 18–24 than other platforms.
Snapchat offers a few ad types, including:
• Story ads
• Sponsored tiles in Snapchat Discover
• Augmented reality (AR) lenses AR lenses are sponsored by a business to create interactive moments that users can use and share with their friends.
TIKTOK
TikTok has exploded in the past few years and has reached 500 million monthly users. That’s more than double the size of Snapchat.
Promoting TikTok videos to allow brands to build awareness with a young target audience.
